Racism, Misogyny, and the Othello Myth: Inter-racial Couples from Shakespeare to Spike Lee - Softcover

Daileader, Celia R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0521613140 ISBN 13: 9780521613149

Publisher: Cambridge University Press, 2005

Synopsis

Through readings of texts spanning four centuries, and bridging the Atlantic - from genres as diverse as English Renaissance drama, abolitionist literature, gothic horror and contemporary romance - Daileader questions why Anglo-American culture's most widely-read and canonical narratives of inter-racial sex feature a black male and a white female and not a black female and a white male. This study considers the cultural obsession with stories patterned on Shakespeare's Othello alongside the more historically pertinent, if troubling, question of white male sexual predation upon black females. Daileader terms this phenomenon 'Othellophilia' - the fixation on Shakespeare's tragedy of inter-racial marriage to the exclusion of other definitions and more optimistic visions of inter-racial tension. This original study argues that masculinist racist hegemony used myths about black male sexual rapacity and the danger of racial 'pollution' in order to police white female sexuality and exorcise collective guilt over the sexual slavery of women of color.

About this title

About the Author

Celia R. Daileader is Associate Professor of English in the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies at the University of Alabama. She is the author of Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge, 1998), and has published numerous articles on feminist theory and criticism, critical race studies, and Renaissance literature. She is co-editor with Gary Taylor of John Fletcher's The Tamer Tamed, and co-editor with Rhoda Johnson and Amilcar Shabazz of Women and Others: Racial and Gender Difference in Anglo-American Literature and Culture.

Edition details

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0521613140
• ISBN 13: 9780521613149
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 268